And these are my notes (drafted for the Thatcher book) on the incident:
On 31 December 1975 QE2 was manoeuvring in the ‘swinging’ ground at Nassau prior to sailing. The seas were choppy and the wind was rough. As her bow turned, her underwater bulbous bow collided with a coral reef and was holed. Passengers reported a ‘jolt’ but there was no panic.
Damage was reported to be a six-foot fracture of the bow, with a jagged hole 18 inches to 20 inches in diameter, and plating was heavily indented.
On 2 January a temporary five-foot concrete patch was fitted by a diver when QE2 arrived as per her schedule at Port Everglades to land passengers prior to continuing her voyage to New York. QE2 remained in Port Everglades for 24 hours.
However, on the voyage to New York the temporary repairs started to leak and QE2 began to take on water again. Her speed was reduced to 15½ knots and Cunard had her diverted to Newport News in Norfolk, Virginia, for further inspection and repairs.
The 1,181 passengers were disembarked here and 500 were repatriated to New York on specially-chartered train (at a cost of £1,250) – a journey which was also beset with mechanical problems and delays.
QE2 was put into dry-dock for 48 hours where an eight-foot steel plate was welded into place.
QE2 eventually arrived in New York on8 January and sailed that day on a revised nine-day (instead of 14) Caribbean cruise.
Captain Hehir was held responsible but on 28 January, the liner’s next call at the port, Staff captain Peter Jackson along with First Officers Sturge and Warwick and members of the ship’s sub-aqua diving club took a boat and set off to investigate the reef. To the exoneration of their Captain they found, by use of sextant readings and landmarks, that the reef had been incorrectly charted: instead of running practically straight it had two 50-foot headlands and on one of these, which projected from the charted line, was evidence of QE2’s collision. A marker buoy was also found to be incorrectly moored (being 130 feet away from its recorded position) and the two errors combined confounded the ship’s navigators’ assumption that the safe water that they had reason to expect was not there.
Permanent repairs were made to the bulbous bow in January 1977 at Bayonne (New Jersey) during a special repairs period.
